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She stops walking.

I stop too. She is looking up at me with an expression I cannot read at all. She has gone quite pale.

"You need not tell me," she says.

"I want to. I have never wanted to tell anyone before."

"Then—" She swallows. "Then tell me someday. Not now. Not here." Her voice is very gentle. "When you are well. When it does not cost you so much. I can wait."

I look at her for a long moment. No one has ever told me I may keep a thing to myself. My aunt demands to know everything. Bingley tells me everything whether I wish it or not. Even Fitzwilliam, who is the most tactful of men, asks with his eyes.

She is giving me permission not to speak, and it is the kindest thing anyone has done for me in years.

"Someday," I agree.

"Someday," she says, and her eyes are bright, and she turns and walks on a little too fast.

***

By Saturday, Fitzwilliam's ten minutes have become twenty, and twenty have become forty, and Pettigrew has given up protesting and only wrings his hands from the terrace.

"I have talked more this week," I tell her, "than in the whole of the last year together."

"I had noticed."

"You are very rude."

"I am very honest. You told me about the trout for twenty minutes on Wednesday. Mrs. Collins timed you."

"Mrs. Collins was a quarter of a mile behind us."

"Mrs. Collins has excellent hearing. And a watch." She glances up at me sideways. "I am not complaining. I like it."

"You like my talking about trout."

"I like your talking." She says it lightly. Then she seems to hear it, and looks quickly away. "For six months I thought you could only say very well and I have not the pleasure."

"I said other things."

"You said I was tolerable."

I stop dead on the path.

"I said what?"

She has gone still too. Her face changes, quick and stricken, as though she has stepped on something sharp.

"Nothing," she says. "It was a long time ago. At the Meryton assembly. You did not know I could hear you."

I remember it. Of course I remember it. Bingley at my elbow, pressing me to dance. Her sitting by the wall. I was in a foul temper that night. I said something to make him leave me alone.

I did not know she heard.

I think of her hearing it. I think of her carrying it about with her for six months, at every ball, every dinner, every time I looked at her across a room and she looked back with those laughing, cool eyes.

"Miss Bennet," I say. "I was a fool, and a liar, and a boor. You were the handsomest woman in that room. You have been the handsomest woman in every room I have seen you in. And I have been miserable about it since October."

She does not answer. She is looking at my waistcoat. Her lower lip is caught between her teeth.